BREAKING TO HARNESS

In placing its experts and the benefit of its research at the disposal of the group of international experts on international law to meet at Cambridge late in February, the Faculty of the Harvard Law School is in line with a growing tendency to give scholarship everyday usefulness. The CRIMSON commented recently upon the way in which Professor Chafee, speaking against capital punishment, demonstrated the usefulness of a professor in a legislative body. It will be also remembered that Professor Frankfurter took a prominent part in clarifying the legal situation involved in the Sacco-Venzetti case.

It is reassuring that a great university and its experts should take an active part in such a creative task, and collect such reliable data that a modern problem might be dealt with in a modern way, by the application of technical knowledge. Not infrequently there has been expressed a hope that the men of American universities would do more than recognize the value to the nation's development of their technical work, but would attempt to apply it at times to certain problems through more direct means than books or the training of capable men. In modern times many problems are too complex to be solved judiciously by anyone who is not a specialist in the field involved. And yet the feeling has been that the professors, who were in many cases the best fitted by their special knowledge to deal with these difficult problems, have denied the world at large the benefit of their immediate cooperation.

The action of the Law Faculty as a whole and the services of its specialists in this case is an indication of a growing desire to extend the usefulness of Harvard University, and a growing recognition of the opportunity to do so.